crafted-emacs VS use-package

Keep an eye on Crafted Emacs which has a v2Beta release branch. It's been evolving. The v2Beta is a rewrite. It aims to provide a minimalist leg up on vanilla Emacs for new Emacs users. It's goal is to take you from first steps to a point where you have learned a great deal and built your configuration. Then you may be comfortable ditching the Crafted Emacs boilerplate configuration entirely. Think of it as a starter kit. Follow SystemCrafters on YouTube (live stream mostly) & Matrix (they are leaving Discord). Despite the live stream being lengthy, there is much to be learned as you bear witness to David figuring things out. Over time, you pickup on those techniques such as looking up a variable state, reviewing functions, evaluating snippets of Elisp in real time, etc. Also recommend, Mastering Emacs as a fantastic ebook with free updates. Once 29.1 ships, no doubt, there will be a free update to the ebook.

I'd recommend you have a look at crafted-emacs. It's an example of how far Emacs can actually go without third-party packages. Then you can add minimal packages (completion and specific tool integrations) to further enhance the experience.

For me it's quite stable except some issues I had with vertico. Anyways, I first started to rewrite my doom config into plain vanilla emacs (with org mode literate configs), and then I discovered crafted which allowed me to remove some code with commonly set sane defaults, e.g. stuff from https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs/blob/master/modules/crafted-defaults.el.

I have been surprised at how many people have so ardently defended only using built-ins and raw package.el and their own janky ensure methods when use-package was available and did it all better. And, it even lets you configure Emacs itself (not just packages), as well as seamlessly letting you try different package management tools like straight.el. Getting it into Emacs itself hopefully makes this a more prevalent way of showing users how to craft their own config.

If you need a staring point for configuring there's some nice light ones like emacs-bedrock and crafted-emacs, and also some fully pre-configured Emacs distributions that you can choose from (though those look harder to configure to one's personal needs to me, but I haven't tried them so wouldn't know).

I'll second https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs

And if you find yourself between the two extremes, perhaps https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs

Another way would be to redefine parts of the bind-key macro or its use-package support functions

The package-install call installs use-package that provides a utility of the same name to make it easier to manage packages. It's admittedly a little overkill for this specific config, but it's a cheap investment that sets you up for later success.

Granted, the Doom macro makes your code looks nice and compact. But you can get very close to that just by using do-list and define-key together. Or by using the bind-key.el package, which is included with Use-package.

> Deps is well documented.

> The issue I personally found is that I needed to look at a bunch of OS project's deps.edn to see how people commonly structure things. Other than that it is a simple tool.

This strikes me as a contradiction, because if it was well documented you wouldn’t need to look at other people’s configs to see how to use it.

My experience with deps.edn is that every time I start a project and make a deps.edn file, I immediately draw a blank and don’t know how to structure it, so I open ones from other projects to start lifting stuff out of them.

I still don’t know how to reliably configure a project to use nrepl or socket repl without just using an editor plugin. I definitely have no idea how to use those in conjunction with a tool like reveal.

To me, none of that is simple. Simple would be like Emacs’ use-package. With that I know how to add dependencies, specify keybinds, and do initialization and configuration off the top of my head. And it has really nice documentation with tons of examples.

https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

Since you are doing code development, the first things to go for would be setting up your emacs packaging (installing use-package and melpa (use-package's documentation covers this) so you have more packages to choose from (do be careful to not just pick things willy nilly but research them a bit first)) and then setting up lsp-mode. lsp-mode lets you use LSP servers for the specific programming languages you work with in a somewhat unified fashion. You then need to install and setup the LSP servers for the languages you use, and possibly install language specific Emacs packages as support (note, Emacs has builtin functionality for many).

I'm using use-package as my package manager and the package ligature for the ligatures.

I have been crafting my emacs config for about 10 years. I started with vanilla and intentionally stayed away from frameworks. About two years ago I declared config bankruptcy and went down for a rewrite using use-package and straight.

ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

use-package! is a macro over use-package, and respect its syntax, with a few additions. Useful reference on use-package keywords.